Beautifully Broken

Beautifully broken. Stunningly shattered. Fabulously fractured. This is me—cracked to the core. My life is like the broken pieces of colored glass you find along a railroad track. You know, after someone has lined up the bottles from their ugly secret and shot them to pieces with a BB gun. My life is all of those sharp, jagged, dangerous shards welded together to form a make-shift stained glass window. With the sun shining through, it looks better than the reality that it is—garbage. I'm garbage too, but I look better with the Son shining through, because He has recycled me.

People say that truth is a thing of goodness, of beauty, of purity. It's all trash. The human truth is a thing of ugliness. What I do and how I behave is ugly. Only God's truth is something of beauty. The ugly truths about myself shatter me, but without them I would not have strength. My dark secrets shatter my soul into ten-thousand sparkling bits, crystal glass from a fallen chandelier on the floor. Waiting for Him to sweep me up.

People say that hope is what keeps you alive. Hope is something I've become cynical about. I try to abandon hope, but no matter how hard I try to not have it—to accept what I have in life—little pieces of fractured hope make their way into my mind. Tiny, bitty thoughts spring up, like a single blade of grass in a barren dirt field. No matter how small, there is hope, and I should not believe the lies my heart has been telling me.

            People say that to be broken is to be incomplete and undignified. You are not good enough. If you have been picked over like a carcass attacked by vultures, if you have been crushed like egg shells under the feet of elephants, you are not worth anything anymore. Others break you, but you also fracture yourself with your own thoughts and actions.

You must become perfectly broken. Go ahead and shatter into a million pieces. Fracture your heart. A dead body buried whole under the earth is in one piece. All of its parts are there, but it is still dead with no soul. Break yourself into bits. Ashes poured into the wind will spread out and never re-unite. They will never be a whole again. Yet, those wind blown pieces will sweep over life, will touch more places, will become a part of something new. Let yourself be beautifully broken, stunningly shattered, fabulously fractured. Because He can do a lot with the pieces.
He is risen. Happy Easter.